American Cinematographer - April 2000 - 62

Quadruple Vision
and three other films

actors
at

the

same

wanted

time

throw

to

as
a

their

running

own

film. I

lot of the respon¬

sibility back onto the actors."
To find suitable

record

a

turned

to

video

out

adjustments in
the Time Code

face lit up, and he whipped out this
series of music sheets where he had

scored
this is

timing script.

used musical
notation paper
to

choreograph

series of cues
for the cast and
crew. Below:
James O'Keeffe
tracks actor
Leslie Mann
outside Book
a

Soup on Sunset
Boulevard using
a Sony DSR-130
DV camcorder.

the film. I

thought, 'Well,
was no

Nightingale, Plus 8's vice president
of sales and marketing, remembers,
"They had to have at least 90
minutes of uninterrupted recording

lenses made now."

was one
a

broadcast-quality CCD imager that
was

able

to

record

at

least 90

The Time Code

camera

opera¬

As

with the

one

of the better video

the operators

practiced

they altered the
further to suit their

cameras,

setups even

personal needs - which were still
not
fully satisfied. Cucchiari
concedes that "the video world has

caught up to the operating abil¬
ity. Film cameras are [completely]
thought-out; they're designed and
augmented by operators so that the
follow-focus is in the right spot and
not

script and blocking was mostly
improvised, Figgis used the scoring
sheets to plot out the specifics of

tors were

originally going to use the
Sony DSR-500, which featured the
camera and recording deck in one

the handles work. With video, it

where the

unit. The

seems

to

actors

and

cameras

needed

be, so actors and crew would all be

on

the

same

page.

He explains,

"Using music-notation paper in
rather the same way one would write
a
string quartet, we wrote the timings
in English, which meant that any
actor at any point could look at his
own script and say, 'At minute 53,1
am doing this and the other three
cameras are
doing that.'"
Adds Cucchiari, "I thought it
was very much like a jazz thing, where
you come to the fore and solo for a

working with the actors, it

was very

much like that, because you were

playing and creating this piece live -
unlike

on a

traditional dramatic film,

where it's all worked
was

This

project
really spontaneous."
Though the film was improvi-

sational, the
adhere

out.

actors were

asked to

explicit storyline. Says
Figgis, "I gave them very specific
to an

characters, and I told them what the
story was. Within those parameters,
they could improvise dialogue, but
the dialogue had to make sense -
they couldn't just go off and do their
own movie. They had to be aware of
the fact that there

April 2000

that date,

of the few formats that still had

formal

little bit, and then retreat and back up
the other musicians. In terms of

56

-

distortion. It's

minutes of footage."

courageous!'"
Because there

Rather than

writing out a
sprawling
script, Figgis

out

Figgis
specialists Plus 8

Video in Burbank, California. Chris

time. DVCam, to

Figgis and
SkarsgSrd work

to

cameras

93-minute feature,

included a follow-focus rig, pistolgrip holders and 3" LCD color
viewfinders just to the left of the lens.
Each camera had a Fujinon 4.8mm
wide-angle zoom lens." Referring to
this lens, O'Keeffe offers, "It's like a
10:1
a very sharp lens with limited

were

26 other

camera was so new

to

the

market, however, that very few
existed for rental. In lieu of the
camera,

professional-grade
Sony DSR-130 industrial broadcast
more

common,

camera,

the dockable version of the

DSR-500. The DSR-130 consists of

the DXC-D30

camera

docked with

a

if all of that has been

neglected.
"We had to walk through

newer

the production opted for the

as

off the shelf and

spend a day or two
just fastening handle grips. We
wound up cannibalizing various
parts that had been left on shelves
and trying to make the bracketry

DSR-1 DVCam

videotape recorder.
set up with a Plus
8-designed, handheld camera-assis¬
tant package that we customized and
designed based on requests from

work

"Each

held for 93 minutes. It

Mike and the other

the

camera was

camera

opera¬

tors," says Nightingale. "The units

[Plus

8's] stores of equipment, pick things

so

the

cameras

could be hand¬
was

much like

constructing Tinker Toys. We tried
things out for a few days, and some of
us eventually just took that stuff off
camera

to

make it

more

suitable,

jim, Patrick and I all let go of the
American Cinematographer - April 2000

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